The Early Days

Life with Peter was easy, for the most part. I can honestly say there was more good than bad. Our friends knew us as the couple that had been together forever. More than once it was remarked (and usually by a friend whose relationship had fallen apart) that we had "the perfect relationship". It was a joke between us, repeated with eye rolling and head shaking. We knew we had it good, and I had a sense of quiet pride about that. One of Peter's friends told me once that the earth would crack open if we ever broke up.

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I guess I should have realized that his statement could indeed come true and my world could be wrenched apart on a catastrophic level.

That's not to say I had no clue that it was coming. The clues were all there, I just didn't know to look for them. We had our share of ups and downs, tight financial times, deaths in the family, jobs that made us spitting, snarling stress-beasts…all the stuff couples go through every day and still come out the other side clinging to each other.

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We usually came out the other side in spite of ourselves, not because of ourselves, and I think that's where the strain began. Peter had an idea of how his life was going to be, mapped out in his head in precise, vivid detail. Every time we missed a marker, he got angry and sullen about the fact that we weren't where we were supposed to be. Mostly, that was financial in nature, but it included careers, the house we lived in, and the stuff the neighbors had that we didn't. I, on the other hand, am a more philosophical kind of person. Did we have enough money to pay the bills, get pizza, take a reasonably frugal vacation somewhere? If so, then we were fine. Anything else was icing on the cake, as far as I was concerned. I didn't need to be making big bucks if it meant not having time for a life outside of work. He saw my lack of corporate ambition as laziness; I saw it as a difference in priorities. We never could come to a shared point of view on that one, and I don't imagine we ever would have.

All of these chinks in our marital armor deepened over the years, and the cracks began to show when we were hit with one of the biggest battles of our lives together: